


After Apple Picking

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: October [4]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Depression, F/M, Family, Fatherhood, M/M, Master of Death Harry Potter, Science Fiction, Suicide Attempt, Time Travel, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 12:15:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,892
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15796338
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: There were worlds upon worlds of things left unsaid and in the end they were little more than dust overwritten. This is where Harry James Potter begins, this is where he ends, and the shadow falls between.





	1. Chapter 1

_“I am eternity”_

-Azrael, October

 

* * *

 

The drift from consciousness into dreaming had grown more alarming with the years rather than less. It seemed as if there was less of a transition now that sleep eluded him. Sometimes all it would take was a blink, a slight closing of the eyes, and then his mind would wander into memory and sometimes even further.

 

Standing in Dumbledore’s office beside the pensive, dressed in the pale form of the now fifteen year old Azrael, he immediately knew that he had drifted into himself once again. In the plane known as reality he was lying with closed eyes on a too small mattress next to a teenage Tom Riddle, but that was neither here nor there but somewhere else entirely, almost irrelevant.

 

Staring at the office it looked more or less the same as it had in his sixth year, before the destruction of Hogwarts and McGonagall’s renovations. Half lit, only the silver memories drifting in the pensive to provide light, it appeared ominous and more than a little surreal the scent of power drifting from the books and glittering silver of unknown inventions.

 

In a corner Fawkes glowed like dying embers in a recently stirred fireplace.

 

Eventually the door to the office opened and a blinking young, so terribly young, sixteen year old Harry Potter stepped in; his eyes attempting to adjust to the light.

 

“Professor, sir, you wanted to see me?” Harry Potter asked staring ahead at his paler, taller, and altogether more ominous counterpart without a moment’s hesitation.

 

So I am to play Albus Dumbledore tonight, he found himself thinking as he looked at the boy.

 

Harry was wearing an attempt at normalcy like a cloak again, looking rumpled with hair askew and robes wrinkled, continually uncertain of his actions and his thoughts. He was still a gawky boy then, thin as if he had been stretched recently like a piece of gum and his round glasses like coke bottles obscuring his eyes. The image of Harry Potter always brought to mind Clark Kent, someone so desperately trying to be average, human, that it made complete mockery of the human existence. The only difference was that the insult that was Harry James Potter was not yet being consciously made at this point.

 

“Come in Harry,” He found himself saying to the boy motioning with a hand wrapped in black for the boy to come and stand next to him and the pensive.

 

Harry did not look apprehensive as he stared at the pensive; he had not yet learned the danger that was human thought and memory or the danger that was Albus Dumbledore for that matter. He looked somewhat confused, uncertain as always, but more than that he appeared excited. Of course, he remembered that this was the year that he had expected to learn to confront the mysteries of his life with the help of the headmaster. What a bittersweet disappointment that had turned out to be.

 

“This year, Harry, we’ll be doing something a little different. Your occlumency studies with professor Snape will be discontinued for the moment and we’ll focus on… history instead.” Again the words were read off like a script with no real conscious intent behind them, as if he too were trapped in a memory, and was only passively watching as it played out.

 

“History, sir?” Here Harry’s eyes narrowed, a touch of resentment, and in them there was a flash of bitter thought and seeds of doubt that Albus Dumbledore had for so long attempted to tear out of him. What good was memory in a war, they seemed to ask. Ah, but Harry, what else is war but memory that refuses to fade?

 

He just smiled at the boy, “Yes, history, you would be surprised how influential one’s past can be, Harry.”

 

(Distantly he recalled that this was not the speech Dumbledore had given Harry in his sixth year introducing the memories of Tom Riddle, he wasn’t quite Dumbledore here then rather more of a poorly skilled actor told to portray Dumbledore but who mostly ended up playing himself.)

 

Harry just frowned, “Sir…” He trailed off, not mentioning that he thought dueling would be more applicable or anything really to help him defeat the menace that was Voldemort.

 

They both stared into the pensive for a moment, at the silver flecks of memory that swirled inside, swimming about in the water. What memories of Tom would be portrayed there, he wondered. Dumbledore had picked such limiting views of Tom, where he had seemed flat and psychotic and barely even a person, Dumbledore had stopped it at ‘I like to make them hurt’ and had gone no further. Perhaps that was all Dumbledore had seen of him or perhaps he had wanted to construct that image for the young Harry Potter, it remained unclear, but however he was portrayed the Tom that Azrael knew was much more multi-faceted and brilliant than the little boy in Dumbledore’s acquired memories had ever been.

 

“I digress though,” He said to the boy, “What we are looking for, Harry, is not simply one’s past but key moments within it. We are on a search you and I, and sometimes to take a step forward we must take several steps back. Such is life, such is the labyrinth, do you understand?”

 

“I guess so…” Harry said, but he truly didn’t, and it was quite evident in his expression.

 

All at once he didn’t want to take Harry Potter through memories of Tom Riddle, to play the role of Albus Dumbledore with only half a heart, he wasn’t sure what Tom was to him now but he wasn’t a projection to be played on the walls of his consciousness like a cheap piece of theater. However there existed no hesitation in the passive watching of dreams and so Azrael who played at Dumbledore led Harry onward into the mists of memory their eyes locked on the pensive.

 

It was not Wool’s Orphanage 1938 with a sour faced Mrs. Cole staring back at a younger Albus Dumbledore in a canary yellow suit. Tom Riddle, or his surroundings, were nowhere in sight. Instead they found themselves on the periphery of a small but homey living room facing two people with red eyes, a too young man with an old expression, and a red headed woman each sitting at the table and looking away from each other.

 

“Oh,” He said to himself rather than to the younger ignorant Harry Potter standing next to him, “Oh, this is me.”

 

* * *

 

Let me tell you a story, it is a tale to last one thousand nights and more, let me tell you a story that sometimes goes by the name Life.

 

* * *

 

“I’m thinking of retiring, in a few years, once Lily Luna is done with school. Then you, me, and the kids can all travel around the world for a bit and I’ll… I don’t know maybe I’ll take up McGonagall on that Defense position she always wants me to take.”

 

Harry didn’t look at Ginny as he said it, looking instead at the wall, and he didn’t know if she was looking at him or not. He kind of hoped she wasn’t, that she was staring at the table, or looking at something but not at him with eyes that were too accusing. It was funny, he was the one who had found her in bed with Dean Thomas so shouldn’t he be the one accusing? He wasn’t though, he wasn’t even laughing, instead he was staring at the wall twiddling his hands and thinking how it was all falling apart.

 

She didn’t say he was too young to be retiring, he was, he had only been the head of the Aurors for a few years now and even for that he was young. Only forty years old and already head of his own department, Molly had been so very proud, she always had been though; the mother he’d never had. He’d done everything too young, saved the country, become an auror, become head of the department, he’d even died too young (of course that one hadn’t really stuck).  When given the position they’d probably thought he’d be there at least ten years, maybe twenty, before he went on to do something else. Maybe become a professor, or perhaps take over after Hermione and become minster, of course he’d never intended to do either of those.

 

He found that he was doing a lot of things that he hadn’t intended to do.

 

“Paperwork never has been my thing, you know, well of course you know that. And I never have liked responsibility, I mean I’ll do it, but I’ve never really…” He trailed off, she still hadn’t said anything and he still hadn’t looked at her.

 

The kids were all off in school, well James had graduated and become an auror, but Albus was towards the end of his Hogwarts career and Lily Luna was in the midst of hers. For the moment it was just him and Ginny in the too big home that also seemed so terribly small. Sometimes he found himself thinking of it as a toy, where he and Ginny could play at house, or maybe it was just him playing at house and family and father.

 

Then sometimes they stopped playing, he’d find Dean or someone else in bed with his wife and they stopped playing for a few crucial moments and really looked at each other. Dean wasn’t the first but some part of Harry, a horrified small voice in his mind, was wondering if he might be the last.

 

He had wanted so desperately to be normal to just be Harry and not be something else.

 

“Harry, look at me.” Ginny said her tone flat and brooking no argument. He turned slowly, not quite wanting to but looking all the same, and there she was staring at him with cold eyes that were somehow still her.

 

She was still Ginny no matter how much she changed, no matter how much he didn’t, she would always be Ginny.

 

“I can’t wait ‘til the kids are out of school, Harry.” She said with a sigh rubbing at her red eyes, he hadn’t caught her crying yet, he hadn’t cried yet either but it was there just around the corner.

 

“Don’t,” He said knowing what crossroads they had just reached, “Please don’t, Ginny.”

 

“No!” She slammed her hand on the table causing him to flinch, “No, Harry, we’re doing this now and you know it too!”

 

Of course he knew it, he wanted to say bitterly, that’s why he was sitting here jabbering away and staring at walls because he knew it. It’s why he wasn’t screaming about Dean Thomas being in his bloody bed with his wife because he knew it.

 

He’d always been good at watching his life fall apart at the seams; he’d been practically trained for it since childhood. That never made it easy though, never painless, he just happened to be very good at it.

 

“Harry, you’re not a bad father or a bad husband…” She started before trailing off shaking her head in frustration, “Shit, that’s not what I meant. Sometimes, though, Harry I wonder if you’re even really a person anymore.”

 

She sighed and rubbed a hand through long red hair just shaking her head and not looking at him, “It’s not just the way… the way you look, although it’s getting weirder and weirder looking like a pedophile because you’re…”

 

She motioned vaguely to him, to his unchanged eighteen year old face, to his gawky almost adult form that had not aged as his mind had, to him still appearing the schoolboy forever and always while everything around him changed.

 

“We can’t talk anymore, you know sometimes we talk and I… I can’t even begin to understand what you’re saying. I feel like you’re just trying, pretending, that you can really talk to me and understand what normal people are like. You’ve never been normal, you’ve never had normal, but you just pretend and nod and smile like you’re one of us when you’re not.”

 

“I…” He tried to interrupt but she had her point there had been nothing normal in him, nothing at all.

 

“Don’t say anything, you know it too, you’ve probably known it longer…” She chuckled a bit, the sort of laughter he used to get when Voldemort lived in his head and everything seemed so absurdly awful, “Merlin, Harry, I just can’t keep doing this. _We_ can’t keep doing this.”

 

If they had had this conversation when he was eighteen, when he was thirty even, he would have screamed back at her that they could and they would because that was what they did. They endured, he endured, that was what life was. She was right though, he was drifting, he’d find himself having odd thoughts every once in a while that were his and not his at the same moment. Being an auror became temporary to him, and time seemed to both speed up and slow down, so that his children were only a minor part of his existence as if he expected to live past them. He felt himself growing accustomed to his too young face, as if he fully expected to see it there every morning staring back at him, and that was more than a little terrifying.

 

(With immortality there always came the image of Voldemort half transformed into a serpent staring back at him with mad red eyes.)

 

“I…” He started again trying to find something in him but whatever spark of thought that had been there had drifted out of him years ago, “What will happen with the kids?”

 

“They’re at Hogwarts most of the time anyway, they’ll live with me in the summer…” She trailed off the question of where Harry himself would go left unanswered.

 

Of course, this thought was more bitter than the rest, she’d want the children with her. He wasn’t a bad father, she’d said, there was a ‘but’ implied in that sentence she’d started. It was odd having Harry Potter for a father, he knew it, his children had grown used to the sights of the wizarding tabloids before they were even speaking full sentences. Their daddy was a symbol to them before he was a person but more than that he was too young far too young and he drifted sometimes and…

 

Of course Ginny would want the children.

 

“You can’t just…” Expect me to leave, take them away from me, throw me out of my own home with Dean Thomas in your bed, so many things left unsaid in that bitter sentence.

 

“I’m not saying you can’t see them, see us, just Harry… It isn’t working and it’s time to let go.” She said, and there was such tenderness there, twenty years of marriage rolled into it that the anger that had been so absent rolled into him like thunder.

 

“Ginny, this is my home, not just yours or theirs or even your lovers’, but it is also mine! I’ll take a vacation, I’ll go see a healer, hell I will do something but I will not walk out of my house as if I am still that freak locked in my uncle’s cupboard!” He stood pushing himself away from the table, magic burning the wood beneath his fingertips and the walls shaking, he forced the rage down and stalked away from the table drawing himself closer to the walls.

 

“This isn’t something a healer can fix, Harry! You died! You died and came back wrong, vacations don’t fix that! Healers don’t fix that!”

 

Her words seemed to echo in the air but in them Harry could only hear the phrase, you came back wrong, drumming into his ears with an incessant force that only came from what was true. He didn’t even need to look at her to know that the death knell had been sounded.

 

* * *

 

In a dream within a dream, viewing a memory with a young Harry Potter, the sixteen year old Harry looked over at what he thought was his professor and said, “Sir, I’m afraid I don’t understand the point of all this.”

 

But the memories rolled on as memories tended to do; they did have their own inertia after all.

 

* * *

 

Hermione hadn’t been the first to visit him. Ron had come first, but he hadn’t been so bad then yet, they had talked about Ginny and work and things at lunch in the ministry and he’d still been… Well he’d still been then. Teddy had come later, wondering if he was okay, and even when it was very clear that Harry was not okay and that he wasn’t going to be okay Teddy had left with only a worried expression.

 

James spent most of his time with Ginny, it was hard to see his father as something other than a figure, something that he might need to be concerned for. He’d dropped in, when Harry had started cleaning out his office and preparing the new head to take over the office once he’d left but it hadn’t been an in depth conversation.

 

It was Hermione though, as it was always Hermione, who was the first to notice that something was terribly wrong and that action had to be taken. He expected nothing less of her, one of the country’s youngest ministers of magic.

 

“Harry!” She rushed into the room where he had been lurking, staring at him with wild frantic eyes, and he looked back at her idly waving a hand and summoning light into the room so that he could better see her face. She’d aged well, not as well as him of course, but well enough. Authority suited her, as he had always suspected it would, and she had been doing wonders for the country over the years leaving him terribly proud of being her friend and brother in law.

 

“Dear Merlin, Harry, you look terrible.” She said softly so that he barely heard it, not quite an admonishing yet, she was too concerned to lecture.

 

“It’s been an interesting year.” He said in acknowledgement but without any real emotion behind it. His eyes drifted back to the wall, to the words written on it and the lines that had been crossed out, he was having trouble coming up with new ideas; the pen was waiting in his hand.

 

“Harry, what are you doing? Quitting your job, leaving the family, becoming a hermit in Grimmuald Place, we’ve all been worried sick about you.” She wrinkled her nose at his surroundings, no doubt bringing to mind memories of Order meetings, Sirius, and Kreature which was a mixed bag for all of them. Grimmuald Place was a place of war and yet he had held onto it over the years never quite willing to get rid of Number 13, and here he was again. Her eyes caught the words on the wall behind her as he had known they would.

 

“Harry…” She said trailing off and reading the words, “Drowning, electrocution, asphyxiation… Harry, what is this?”

 

She already knew what it was, he could see that, Hermione had always been a very clever girl. Still, he’d realized in the past year that people liked to play games; with each other and with themselves. They liked to play pretend and they didn’t like when someone told them the charade was up.

 

“A list.” He said with a small smile, “It’s just a list.”

 

“That’s not what I meant, Harry!” She said and pointed to the wall anger now visible in her expression, “What is this Harry?”

 

“You probably shouldn’t call me that.”

 

“What are you talking about?”

 

“Harry, you probably shouldn’t call me that.”

 

No, it wasn’t quite anger in her eyes, he decided it was fear. A deeper darker fear than he had ever seen before, not with the dark lord hounding their footsteps, not with Bellatrix’s mad laughter in the next room.

 

“It’s your name, Harry, what are you talking about?”

 

He gave her a grim smile and slowly brought himself to his feet motioning for her to follow him into the kitchen where he began to make tea. As he put the kettle on the stove and retrieved the cups he started talking, “I’ve been thinking a lot lately, Hermione, really thinking. I know, it’s a new hobby, but it passes the time when time just doesn’t seem to pass. Anyway I’ve been thinking and I realized that I haven’t been Harry for a while, if I was ever Harry to begin with.”

 

She didn’t say anything, he could feel her staring at his back waiting for him to finish, “You see, I thought back to that time with the train and the killing curse and the deathly hallows, Master of Death we said. As if three brothers could find immortality with a rock, a stick, and a jacket; a really nice rock, stick, and jacket but really… Anyway so I started wondering, was that really the first time that I’ve gone there and back again, I thought about it and I realized that no… I had been to that station before, I just hadn’t recognized it.”

 

He turned to her with an expression of wonderment on his face, the expression he had worn when it had all pieced together in his head, each fact falling into place in his head as if it has always been there. In that moment there had been no room for the horror and rage he had always expected at such a revelation.

 

She looked so small, her mouth in a grim line, and her eyes wide with tears gathering in the corner but she was going to let him finish even if it killed her to do it.

 

“My third year, the dementors, a whole swarm of them descending on me and Sirius like flies on a corpse. My second year, the basilisk fang lodged in my arm, I should have been dead in seconds. I had always thought it was luck, tremendous unbelievable luck, but then… There was always that famous one, the first one, October 31 1981 with the killing curse at my head. Love, was it really love Hermione?” He shook his head and closed his eyes picturing his mother, weeping over him and screaming as the dark lord destroyed her.

 

“There have been so many mothers and so many children, were they loved any less than I was?”

 

In the pause before he started again, tears gathering at his eyes as well but simply staying, not yet falling.

The kettle whistled.

 

He poured the tea into a glass and handed it to Hermione, she took it robotically, her hands stiff and cold against the cup.

 

He sighed, “Maybe, maybe I’ve always been like this, maybe there never really was a Harry James Potter. Maybe I’ve always been… wrong and I’ve just been trying to fool everyone and myself.”

 

“What’s the list, Harry?” There was a crack in her voice, unwilling, but there all the same.

 

“The list, is everything I’ve tried so far, and everything that hasn’t worked.”

 

They stared at each other for a few moments, the words simply sinking in, and then she was yanking his hands the porcelain cup shattering on the floor and spilling tea onto his bare feet.

 

“You are not staying here alone.”

 

She side along apparated him and Grimmuald Place was empty once again.

 

* * *

 

Watching the scene play out he found himself thinking of the resulting episode that had taken place at Hermione and Ron’s home; him sitting in the hallway staring at pictures of Rose and Hugo while Hermione and Ron’s furious bickering could be heard in the background. Things along the lines of, can’t be left alone, suicidal, needs our help, and always was fine by himself you’re making a big deal out of things again.

 

Ron had never handled emotions particularly well, especially Harry Potter’s, because at the end of things Harry’s problems had seemed so monstrous and untouchable in comparison to the everyday man’s.

 

He had ended up staying there, only a few days, as Hermione was not a force to be reckoned with but he had more or less quit his hobby of suicide by that point anyway. After assuring her that he was no longer depressed, a statement she didn’t believe, and assurances that he would return he went with his original idea of taking a vacation far from Britain.

 

It was his first time truly leaving the country. Being Harry Potter had demanded so much time, effort, and contribution to magical Britain that he had lost the time where he could simply roam elsewhere. In abandoning his name, in recognizing that Harry Potter as such was only an idea of a person, he was able to finally leave.

 

He walked the world, seeing everything he felt worth seeing, writing home to the swiftly growing children and dwindling friends when it suited him and feeling altogether like a leaf on the wind.

 

He did return, as he promised, but it would not be for many years and even then it had only been when they summoned him back.

 

* * *

 

The memory changed, young Harry twitching with it, this one was much more brilliant than the others had been and seemingly much more terrible for it. They stared into the flames that once had housed the Department of Mysteries in the ministry of magic.

 

“What’s going on…” The young Harry asked squinting against the light and looking around to get a grip on his surroundings.

 

“Unplanned consequences.”

 

At the edge of the flames a man stumbled out, a still eighteen year old seeming Harry Potter, dressed in travel worn muggle clothing and wearing a grim soot streaked expression of determination. Although his face was still unbearded, clean as it would always be, he did not appear quite boyish anymore. His glasses had disappeared and there seemed to be a sharper more solemn cast to his features that leant him the maturity that the schoolboy Harry Potter had lacked.

 

He stopped and stared at the flames, seemingly unconcerned when it licked at the tips of his boots and fingers, and the fire danced in his eyes. After a long moment he turned and raised his color to the colder night and walked away with hunched shoulders into the dark.

 

It was the last night he would ever consider himself British.

 

* * *

 

News had reached him slowly, he rarely stayed in one continent long enough for mail to reach him. He’d found that he was much more magically gifted than he’d thought, when he tried that was, and apparating to far off destinations with only a post card to guide him was not as impossible as it seemed. Wandless magic had become easier, he’d never tried it before but it seemed almost instinctual, he no longer bothered with small spells like lumos or reparo when a thought or a twitch of a finger would do it for him.

 

Perhaps that should have been more unnerving, all this power inside him, but being away from Britain and Harry Potter had made it easier to accept things like that.

 

He kept in contact with Hermione, the children, Teddy, and sometimes Ron and Ginny. Ginny had been very angry when he first disappeared into Grimmuald Place and later into the world. He supposed she hadn’t intended the train wreck that had been the end of their marriage and he wouldn’t blame it on her but it had happened all the same. He wasn’t sure he wanted to see Ginny, to see her with someone else, Dean Thomas or some other man and see her being happy and normal in a way he never could have provided. His marriage still brought bittersweet memories to him, wine that had almost turned sour, he drank nostalgia all the same.

 

He wrote back, he always wrote back, but he tried not to let the images linger in his head.

 

He had always intended to return but the vacation became longer and longer as he wandered further and further away from that rainy island nation. He saw things, humanity spread across the land, both muggle and magic all great cities and people that he had never realized existed. Looking at that world, wandering among the different cultures, it was hard to remember that he ever needed to go back.

 

If that last letter hadn’t come he didn’t know how long he would have remained gone.

 

It was Hermione who told him, in blunt uncharacteristic words, you need to come home now.

 

She had left him one final warning above her signature, “The Department of Mysteries”

 

She was no longer minister; she had been replaced although she had never intended to devote her life to politics. She had left and spent her time researching now as many other great witches and wizards before her and as governments did it changed and began to resemble the ogliarchy that Voldemort and the resulting restoration after his war had sought to destroy.

 

He had told Hermione, before he left, that it was best that he go before the Department of Mysteries got too interested in why the boy who lived seemed to keep on living at the same age. It had been a joke then, half serious, but still a joke.

 

“They haven’t done anything yet,” She’d said to him when he arrived in her kitchen looking wildly at her and demanding explanation, “But they’ve been asking if we’ve had any contact and Albus says that he, Lily Luna, and James have all been getting weird letters in the mail asking them to come in for some standard testing he’s never heard of before.”

 

He’d lost most of his temper as a teenager, without Voldemort in his head everything had seemed less infuriating, but a spark of it tinged in fear came into his consciousness at the idea of his children in bits and pieces strewn about the innards of the government. He must have looked wild then, half-crazed, because Hermione was placing hands on his shoulders and sitting him in a chair with a wide-eyed expression.

 

“Harry, I don’t know if it’s that bad yet, and your children can take care of themselves they always have been capable… I just thought that you should know.”

 

He didn’t act that night, he stayed in Britain but he simply kept watch, and the months grew darker as the pestering of his children grew and the attempts to find him became more insistent. Still he did not move, not until the bill was passed before the Wizengamot, increasing research into inhuman creatures and allowing more ethically questionable research to be performed should it be for the good of society.

 

Perhaps it had been impulsive, perhaps it would not have escalated as he thought it might, but the labyrinth that was the Department of Mysteries had never left him and had always lingered in his nightmares.

 

He went without even a second thought and before he knew it he was standing before the building that housed the Ministry of Magic and the basement was on fire with the Department of Mysteries inside.

 

(The next day he would find them, Lily Luna, Albus, and James and tell each of them with a solemnity that he hadn’t worn since during the war that they needed to leave magical Britain; it was no longer their country to claim.)

 

* * *

 

“The government survived of course, rebuilt itself, although much of the research within the Ministry was lost with the destruction of the department of Mysteries. Not that, after the first time we had run through it, there had been much left to destroy but what little headway had been made in the restoration had once again been put aside. They left my children alone, which was really all I had wanted from them.”

 

The young Harry Potter nodded slowly as if attempting to understand but not quite comprehending. He had no doubt that Harry’s expression had been similar in watching the young Tom Riddle through the various memories Dumbledore had shown him. No one could ever say that Harry James Potter did not try.

 

The world around them had reverted back to the silver mist of memory. It was as good a place to reflect as any, and perhaps it was something of a stopping point for him as well as the country, it would be the last time they looked to him as a messiah certainly. He had always wavered between messiah and fugitive for the British but even they had acknowledged that he had always had reasons for what he did that could be found in the greater good of the nation. In burning down the central government building Harry had ceased to exist solely for them and they had all found that more or less concerning.

 

James having built his life in Britain did not take his father’s advice and instead stayed and weathered the storm. His letters to his father would become fewer and fewer as he resented the terrorist act that had left him as well as the rest of the family in something of a bind. Albus had not travelled far, elsewhere in Europe, and occasionally he would meet with his father as he too roamed the countryside doing odd jobs here and there. Always in his eyes there would be a lack of understanding, an attempt to know his father, but a sad sort of acceptance as he never reached it. It was Lily Luna who went the furthest, traveling the world as he continued to do and see what she could make of it taking after both of her namesakes in the same instant. None of them fully understood the fear he had felt, his reasons for burning down the Ministry, it had only been a shadow to them and for that he would be forever grateful.

 

“Where did he go then?” Harry asked, not yet identifying this older broken man with himself. How could he? At that age Harry had more or less expected to die when Voldemort did. The idea of an older, even if he looked the same, version of himself was inconceivable.

 

“Wherever the wind would take him, that’s what it means to be nameless, you become the leaf on the wind.” He said with a sigh, “Of course, Britain is hardly the end or beginning of all things, and I suspect we still have many more memories to go.”


	2. Chapter 2

“I fear that I am dreaming or that someone is dreaming me. My boggart is me and yet I am also my boggart’s boggart.”

 

* * *

 

Walking in the desert tundra, read frozen earth beneath his feet, he closed his eyes and saw light.

 

It wasn’t until he left Earth that he started dreaming.

 

He suspected it was the mindset, it always boiled more or less down to psychology. On Earth, even immortal and yet changing, eyes gaining perfect vision becoming impervious to things like heat or cold or physical fatigue he still felt human. He’d think every once in a while that he wasn’t, rage about it silently in his head, curse his fate and attempt to forget it all in the same instant but some part of him still gripped the dream that was Harry Potter very tightly.

 

He drifted from humanity in the way that Tom Riddle had once drifted from his humanity; they were still derivatives of that higher equation called man.

 

In leaving Earth he left multiple things that he hadn’t realized he had been clinging to.

 

One was the wizards themselves; he had left wizarding society even before the death of his own children, certainly by the death of their few children. The Potter clan, wherever they were, most likely would not recognize his face if he wandered into their home; he didn’t know if he resented that fact or not.  Certainly in Britain he had not been welcome having been proclaimed first a terrorist and fugitive by the government for arson and an attempted coup (they always thought up the wrong reasons for his actions) and then later being proclaimed dead when he could not be found and too much time had passed for even the once-messiah to be alive.

 

He had still been there, on the edges, in the crowds, on the fringes looking in. He walked in robes bought in stores and held his holly wand in his left hand though increasingly he found he didn’t really need it. He thought about places like Hogwarts and things like quidditch and found that they weren’t alien to him.

 

He supposed it began to unravel when the statute of secrecy fell apart. In hindsight it was inevitable, they were extremely lucky it had lasted even as long as it did. Magic, it turned out, was not solely the tool of wizards. With great advances in technology the muggles reached a point where to a muggle-born child approached by a wizard there seemed to be no difference between magic and physics. It wasn’t a careless accident on the part of a wizard, or botched obliviation that revealed them as everyone had thought but instead a failure to consider that their cousins who had discovered electricity and nuclear reactions without magic would be able to find their secrets in a similar manner. Magic was the universe, it didn’t rely on words or images, and they had forgotten that and in their hubris they had assumed that the true world belonged to them and them alone. What fools they had all been.

 

(When they had first stared each other in the face, close enough to see the whites of each other’s eyes, he had thought of stepping to the front again until he’d had the alarming thought, “Which side should I stand on?”

 

Because he played at being wizard as he had once played at being Harry Potter, he walked in wizard’s robes and talked about their sports and culture, but he was no longer a wizard. The wand was superfluous and he had burnt down their government; it was no longer so clear what he was supposed to be. It was no longer clear who the victims were in the equation and what side a hero inherently belonged to if he was able to play the hero at all anymore.)

 

They tolerated each other at first, but then of course the young and stupid, wizard and muggle alike grew tired of the tolerance and started killing each other.

 

Some would say it escalated into killing, that it had been stupid violence and name calling at first, but to him it had all been so terribly fast that name calling and death were almost the same thing.

 

There was murder, mayhem, death, and revolution for a few bloody decades; more terrible than anything Voldemort could have concocted leaving him to wonder how he could have been so stupid and naïve to believe that Tom Riddle was the height of horror and wretchedness.

 

They would leave the corpses of women in the streets as they tore their magical born children from them and next to them there would be the corpses of the magical born children who were culled before the wizards found them. And he had stood, still and stiff, in the center of it all feeling as if he was drowning in all the pointless death.

 

He didn’t like to think on the details.

 

Things settled, this sort of violence had always been on the fringes among the extremists and never in the general public, for the most part it was a quiet sort of tolerance that only raged and shouted on the edges; there was never anything that could be called a war. The muggles had had their foot out of the door before the wizarding fiasco, they were already preparing to leave. Slowly but surely the great cities emptied and desperate magicless people left attempting to find freedom and space among the stars.

 

The wizards stayed. Their art, their magic, everything was based on the familiar things they knew; trees, magical creatures, astrology, everything for them rooted them to the Earth so that it was inconceivable that magic could exist anywhere else. Perhaps they meant to reclaim the Earth now that the muggles had finally left, to finally cleanse the land of both muggles and muggle-born children, but whatever their intentions that was more or less the result.

 

Looking into the heavens, at the pale blue eye that was Earth, he wondered what meaning the centaurs would find in it. It shone far too brightly, too cold, for it to be anything called hope.

 

He’d waited a long time, through the first wave to settle the moon and then the subsequent waves that would urbanize it and make it glitter in the dark, it was in the settlement of the cold red eye of Mars that he left.

 

The legends of Harry Potter had faded in the bloodshed that was the end of the statute of secrecy, messiahs came when they were called, and he didn’t so therefore he had never existed in the first place.

 

So he had stepped onto a small, overcrowded, transport to Mars his holly wand still in his hand, as if he needed it, and that had been the end of it.

 

So there he was, a stranger in a strange land, only not quite because he had always been alien so only in the alien landscape could he truly belong. Wizardry dripped from him, pooling over in his footsteps, and he walked forward shedding his past behind him. He rode into the desert on a horse with no name and in his head that distant almost forgotten song played as red sand gathered beneath pale feet.

 

In the dream he was barefoot, his clothes made of starlight, cold and ephemeral against his pale skin. He was still in human form but he recognized that it was only form, transmutable, changeable and constantly in flux as any form was. He maintained it with a distant thought, almost apathetic, as if it was only a shell of himself and walking forward he felt his mind spread and reach the most distant corners of the galaxy.

 

It was a place where language was only crude drawings of the higher ideas that existed within him and humanity was a sweet and bitter thing that he held so closely to himself.

 

Before language, before thought, before sentience, before time, before magic there was the idea.

 

Within each and every being he both stood and passed through, green the color of grass and all growing things, and everywhere light smiling back even as their eyes fell silent to the sight that was the true unguarded world.

 

I am the instant, the frozen frame forever caught, as well as the great river reaching outwards rushing past with only change to define my existence. I am the shadow and the light, all possibilities endless, I am that I am.

 

But that was language caught in his head and translating for the human form he wore.

 

There was only the idea, the eternal wordless idea, stretching forever beyond both space and time and all other binding dimensions.

 

* * *

 

“And what, exactly, Azrael was that supposed to be?” The young and eager Harry Potter had transformed into Tom Riddle sometime during the memory. Not transformation, that implied a gradual visible change, it was instantaneous as if he had truly been Tom all along.

 

(Perhaps they were, Dumbledore had always implied that Harry Potter and Tom Riddle were somehow, in some inexplicable manner, two sides of the same coin. That’s what destiny was after all, the great mirror, in the end both were more ideas than they were human.)

 

This was not the flat Tom from Dumbledore’s perspective but rather the one that he had come to know in the past few years. He almost seemed to glow, in whatever room he wandered into he drew attention to himself and thus to his surroundings, everything gained focus in his presence.

 

It was Tom as he currently was, not quite a young man but not quite a boy either, steadily reaching a height over six foot with long limbs that did not seem lanky and pale skin that did not seem sickly. Those eyes, that pale burning blue, stared at him with an expression that was at once fond, exasperated, curious, and also a trifle dangerous as if he knew that something lurked within his friend only just beneath the surface. (Azrael, he called him it so easily, but the way he said it made it seem as if it carried so many shadows). It didn’t seem to matter that he wore the second hand, ill-fitting, underclothes that he slept in; he radiated confidence in a manner that belonged to gods and not to men.

 

Tom Riddle would have made a better Harry Potter than he had, prophecy was written all over his face; that was the truth of it.

 

A quicksilver smile flashed on those lips, “I had always assumed you had a tendency for poetics; I had not realized you were literally describing the madness that you perceived.”

 

“I dream, sometimes.” He said sitting himself down onto the floor of the red desert they still occupied, Tom followed suit crossing his legs seemingly without concern for the red dirt that stained his clothing.

 

It wasn’t the real Tom, as Tom was sometimes real when distressed enough to find his way into his head, that phantom limb of the horcrux still twitched sometimes and it must been that way for Tom as well. No, this was only the image of Tom as he had once been the image of Harry Potter, a foil for his thoughts. Still, dreaming as he was it seemed best to play along with the idea of Tom.

 

“You dream, sometimes.” Tom repeated with raised eyebrows nodding his head towards the formless, shapeless, light that danced around them as if that could not be the explanation.

 

“I dream of what I used to be, before Harry Potter came into existence, before I claimed sentience for myself. It’s rarely comprehensible, and always difficult to grasp afterwards, but the longer I remain in the universe the closer I come to it.”

 

“You used to be a bad trip?” Tom inferred again with those raised eyebrows that expressed so much doubt. Those words were a bit unlike Tom, the term trip hadn’t come about until heavy use of drugs and was a bit out of Tom’s timeframe, it revealed him as a cheap imitation still he answered the image of Tom Riddle all the same. Talking to oneself was a habit he hadn’t quite managed to remove after becoming Azrael.

 

“I used to be an idea, I still am, I have only fashioned myself into an avatar so that I might touch the brilliance that is humanity. I still feel it, lurking inside me all the time, the way I used to be always reaching outwards and so terribly fascinated in spite of everything. I… There are flashes, sometimes, the Peverells, a red headed woman… Flashes of thought that came long before 1980.”

 

Tom considered him in the starlight, his face so still in the half light, and leaning forward towards him with that almost smile he liked to wear he said, “So then, you don’t really know, you infer.”

 

He shrugged, “I inferred in the way we all infer, how do you know you are human Tom?”

 

“Naturally, I don’t.”

 

No, he thought, Tom had always been in a similar situation to him. It was strange though, for all of Tom’s doubt Tom Riddle had in many ways come to represent humanity itself to him. He was both the darkest and the brightest aspects of human nature, constantly in conflict with himself, as he tore through and murdered and built and created wonders all in the same instant. Tom burned so brightly, so swiftly, that he could not help but be more than he was.  

 

These were not words even the image of Tom desired to hear though, so he continued.

 

“Fine, how do most people know that they are human? They are told and told again, they accept the facts they are given. I accepted a fact as I was given it and when that facts failed to provide I searched within myself for evidence, perhaps I am not Death, but I am not human and I have always been an idea. Perhaps Death is the wrong word; it always comes back to words in the end, language fallible and so very limited. Death is the word I chose and was chosen for me but I am so much more than simple Death, I only hope that the word I am searching for is not God.”

 

* * *

 

His taking the name of Death for himself was not nearly so dramatic as it could have been. He did not stand before the masses, a column of fire behind him, and declare, “I am become Death Destroyer of Worlds.”

 

The first time he used it there was only an audience of one, a little girl with pale hair and too much magic in her blood, and she would stare at him with the raised eyebrows of the disbelieving.

 

Standing on the edge of a dust wracked farm, a tool in her calloused hands, and him standing in the worn cloak of a traveler outside her gate she had asked him in a casual tone that was not all that curious, “What’s your name stranger?”

 

“Death.” He’d responded and she had only looked at him with narrowed eyes.

 

“That’s not a name, stranger.”

 

The idea of Death as his identity had always been on the fringes of his thoughts, perhaps had he not encountered the hallows, had he not been told a tale of three brothers and a bridge he would have claimed some other title. As it was though he had destroyed the hallows and for a single moment had been recognized as the Master of Death.

 

He didn’t believe in the Master of Death though, he never really had, even on returning from the station between life and death he had always been more than a little dubious about the title. It hadn’t really mattered, to him, in forsaking the hallows he had forsaken the title. It only became relevant when Harry Potter stopped aging and close friends started gossping about things gone wrong and consequences of rising from the dead too many times.

 

Ginny had been the first to call him that, in spite of being his wife and someone he considered the love of his life for so very long, she had been the most insensitive of all of them. Her temper got the better of her, as Ron’s did occasionally, but she had the insight that Ron sometimes lacked and where Hermione stayed silent she spat the words out like fiery sparks.

 

“People don’t marry the Boy Who Lived or the Master of Death, Harry!”

 

It’d been after some pointless argument, in the middle of their marriage when they were still trying, she had been complaining about the press and he had been as well but in a different manner. He had long since grown to expect it but she hadn’t, not for her or for their children, and so they had ended up screaming at each other and she had brought up that even though she had married Harry James Potter she hadn’t intended to marry him.

 

He was more than Harry, even then, he was Harry with epithets included.

 

Leaving Earth as his dreams and sometimes even his waking moments became steadily more surreal, as languages became sensations like stepping onto different paths with bare feet, and his understanding of magic became more and more intuitive he still doubted that things like the Master of Death existed. He believed in Death though, he had always believed in Death.

 

The world continued to change, the colonies grew crowded and memories drifted from Earth, sometimes he wondered what had happened to those wizards but something in him stopped him from checking. They moved outwards, beyond the grey moon and the red eye of Mars, past the solar system even to other suns with more earth-like planets than before.

 

As a nameless vagrant he went with them wearing the faces of the homeless man, the fortune teller, the handy man, and the ronin with a kind of realism that came with too many years and too much use. They appreciated the fortune teller the most, he thought, perhaps even more than the ronin who occasionally would solve disputes in townships. It was always the fortune teller they were most willing to believe, reading the tea that was their future with a distant smile, this is what might be, this is possibility, he breathed.

 

He always found that funny, divination was one thing he still didn’t excel at, the future was as unknown as it was infinite and he never knew what time would bring him. Time was weird, that’s what he had decided, looking at time everything was always fuzzy somewhat blurred until it was hard to tell anything from anything else. It was cluttered, crowded, and everything Trelawny had ever said about it was clearly complete bullshit.

 

People did like their prophecies though.

 

He had decided to be the fortune teller that day on the newest colonized world Ianus, a place that was still more desert than tree, that took water pumped into it but did not necessarily appreciate the gesture. The role did not require a change in costume but more demeanor, a distant confidence, certain gestures of the hands. Perhaps it was simply that the role of the prophet, the prescient, came the most naturally to him now.

 

It was like this that he had found the girl and her farm, parents out of sight most likely in the meager market place he had just passed through and she had asked his name and as if he had not thought of anything else he had given her the one that was always on the edge of his mind.

 

* * *

 

Her name was Fu, Chinese and English had slowly morphed together until names of Chinese descent were just as common to Harry as names like Emily and Jessica had once been. She’d taken the stranger named Death into her house, _Sǐwáng_ as she said; death, doom, the destruction of things, the harsher death that came with war and violence and disease rather than the softer _Chángmián_ , an omen of ill fortune which he supposed he was and had always been.

 

She ushered him into the house made of stone, strangely primitive and technologically advance all at once, as communications systems were embedded into the walls but a barely functioning stove top rested near the window. She was small, as Lily Luna had once been, a small delicate thing set to the farm when no son showed up to replace her.

 

She did not ask him to tell her fortune though he offered when she passed him a cup of tea, instead she began, “You are like me, I didn’t think there were any like me.”

 

She gave no demonstration of her powers and did not ask for any such demonstration from him but he knew the word she was looking for all the same, magic, he wondered how long ago it was that he had used it blatantly in front of others, for effect rather than necessity. Fortune telling wasn’t magic, no the true magic was still on Earth, the most he ever gave people for free were parlor tricks. Wizards still did not have the best reputations even with the increase of years and distance between them.

 

“There are others. They chose not to journey from Earth, but that was centuries ago and longer with fast travel, I don’t know how they are faring. As far as I know I am the only one to have journeyed to the stars.” These future languages, the ones that didn’t belong to Earth, were always a little odd to him. He spoke them fluently enough, and in some ways they were more intuitive even than his native English, but speaking them always made him regretfully think back to Earth and all he had seen and done there and eventually left behind. It was a blend of English and Chinese, words thrown in here and there from a hodge podge of languages and the grammar blending together, it was a language made of pebbles until it formed a shore line with the waves of time beating against it and smoothing it out.

 

She was not one for small talk and although she dreamed she was very practical, “You are a master?”

 

“Some might call me that, I have been practicing a very long time, longer than anyone else.” He said, for while magic had not been his passion as it had been Hermione’s through living and enduring he had come to understand it more deeply than she ever could in her limited life time.

 

“Teach me.”

 

It was then, with that single direct demand, that he took on his first student. She stayed with her parents for the first few years, meeting him between work at night, practicing in every spare moment. But soon enough her parents looked for her to be married and she wandered off with him for a while. It was nice, companionship, a soft thing that reminded him and made him forget about Ginny and the few others who had touched him all at once. For a long time he did not dream of any of their faces.

 

She was not as powerful as him but more so than any other student her age would have been, and she understood, the wordless and complex energy that drifted through the universe. She understood that magic was not magic that it was not _móshù_ or anything as cheap as that but closer to _shén_ ; divinity. She had no misconceptions about wands or words or muggle born or science or anything that had always plagued him on Earth. Fu was fresh and new and she understood because he told her what he saw was truth.

 

This is light, the young Death said, this is the world and all we are.

 

She was not as powerful as him and she was not half as immortal, so when they went into town one day on the far side of the world Ianus walking on foot rather than spaceship or hovercraft to better see the stars and mountains she travelled without him and decided to play the role of the ronin in a Clint Eastwood film.

 

They were just a bit faster than her thoughts had been.

 

* * *

 

“I buried her beneath the mountains and left the planet the next day.” He explained to Tom as they took in the image of the young Death so quiet in mourning over the grave of a girl who may or may not come to exist in a thousand years on a planet so very far from Earth.

 

Tom said, merely regarded the scene with a solemnity that wasn’t quite like him, perhaps he was reminded of his own precious mortal state that he fought so desperately. Or perhaps he was wondering why they had met her at all, this tiny flicker of existence, of promise only to be dashed out against the rocks. But that’s what life is, he wanted to shout, this is all life is the particle and the wave in the same moment always continuing and singular until we wonder why we give distinction at all.

 

He still held his holly wand after her death, still wandered the planets and lost stars in darker peasant’s clothing, still called himself Death and walked in and out of legend while dreaming universes in his head.

 

What is the significance of anything, of young girls called Fu, of young almost men named Harry Potter? What are we, flickering momentary lights that we are, at the end of things in the story without end?

 

But then, that was why Tom sought eternity, so perhaps he was at least partially aware. Death named Azrael continued looking beyond the death of his first apprentice and into the mist.

 

“There were good moments, like Fu, and there were bad moments, like her death. With an identity I didn’t drift quite as blatantly, I didn’t have purpose per se, but I was aware of my own existence. There was innovation but there were also terrible wars and humanity stretched itself thin between the stars, I could feel it when the last people died out on Earth, in the end I didn’t even need to return I felt it in my very soul. It was like this for thousands of more years, I flickered in and out of existence, Death who took the form of a man. I was rarely taken seriously and then, one day, I was.”

 

He turned to Tom, there was so much he could show him, so many years they could travel. They could see the great cities of Guāng the planet called light, they could see the moments of magic he allowed himself, of natural disasters averted and armies stopped, they could watch the legends of him rise and fade waxing with the moons of different planets, they could see C-beams glitter in the dark off the Tannhäuser Gate, but those moments were not for Tom or even the young Harry James Potter.

 

These moments were overwritten, washed out, existing only in memories. They no longer mattered; nothing more than dreams.

 

“In the end there was only one barren planet left and on it one mad king.”

 

* * *

 

He hadn’t realized anyone was looking for him but he supposed with a name like Death it would be tempting for any mad man to seek him out. Occasionally he’d find the odd person who’d heard of him, who stabbed him through the heart with a knife, or else ask that he stab someone else for them. He always was disappointing to these people more or less.

 

Perhaps it was in some way his fault that he had let it come so far as a single planet dwindling in the sky. He had felt the soul of Earth burn out housing the last of the wizards with it, he had felt the end of the moon, of Mars, of planets further and further from their origin until this single desolate planet remained drifting in space.

 

He was not God though, he had accustomed himself to that fact, he was very wary of Deus ex Machina. Every time he moved, touched, or brushed something he was reminded that he was no longer one of these people and thus could not act for them. They must act, work, destroy, and live for themselves and he could not do it for them no matter how painful it was to watch. So he watched and he wondered and he let humanity drift until there was only one planet left.

 

The first time the man confronted him he was very young, a band of rogues and thieves behind him, not yet a king or even a general but frothing at the mouth with the desire for power none the less. They said Death who took the form of a man had once taught a girl named Fu to perform miracles with only her hands and had the power to destroy nations and kingdoms with a single glance.

 

The man asked him for a holy war, he had proudly stood to face the man in black with green eyes and pale skin wearing the clothes of a peasant, and in his eyes there had been smoke and fire and anarchy.

 

Of course he had said no.

 

“Holy wars are hardly my business, I’m afraid the jihad is entirely a human affair.”

 

He had stepped out of that world for a few years but things change quickly and the man had a sort of charisma, even in his madness, that presented him with followers. In the end he had not needed Death on his side, he had only needed guns, and after he was done disease and famine took care of the rest.

 

And then, somehow, there was only him and the universe staring back.

 

Somehow he had continued to exist past the end and then once the end was reached there was everything stretching out before him and nothing.

 

Letting go of himself, of the now empty world, and finding himself in a replication of King’s Cross Station had almost been like coming home.

 

At the end of the things it was a train to Somewhere.

 

* * *

 

Stepping on he had found himself an empty compartment, had waited for the train to roll out of the station and on towards Scotland, and before him there had been nothing and nothing only the bitter end to everything that he had failed to alter.

 

And then there had been light, “My name is Tom Riddle, yours?”

**Author's Note:**

> Someone at some point asked for a prequel to October so we have this lovely thing.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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